PMQs: Starmer comes out swinging

Sir Keir Starmer was determined not to go down without a fight at this week’s PMQs. Following a week in which The Times ran a piece titled ‘What is the point of Keir Starmer?’ and a widely shared tweet by a Spectator journalist suggested that his “current approach seems to be to agree with Boris Johnson but in a special disappointed voice”, the Labour leader was keen to strike a more combative tone.

With little option other than to agree with the PM’s roadmap, Starmer conceded that it was “plainly right” that the end of lockdown should be “cautious and irreversible”, before homing in on the dissenting voices from within Johnson’s own party.

Starmer pointed out that one of the biggest threats to this timetable is “misinformation about the risks of the deadly virus” and asked the PM whether he thought claims that “Covid statistics appear to have been manipulated” and that “the roadmap is based on dodgy assumptions” are irresponsible and undermine national recovery.

Clocking the direction of the attack, Johnson quickly rattled off the four steps of his “cautious but irreversible journey to freedom” before Starmer retorted: “I think the Prime Minister dodged that question, no doubt because all those comments came from his own MPs, some of the 60 or so members of the Covid Recovery Group” and suggested that “perhaps the Prime Minister should have a word with them”.

“Another big threat to the recovery plan”, Starmer continued, “is that around three in ten people who should be self-isolating aren’t doing so.” Responding to Starmer’s challenge to make £500 of isolation payment available to everybody who needed it, Johnson assured him that people on low-paid jobs were at the top of the government’s priority list and hinted the budget would say more on the topic next week.

Starmer was ready with a response: “If you need £500 to isolate, you’re out of luck. If you’ve got the Health Secretary’s WhatsApp, you get a million-pound contract”. He added that he wasn’t asking the PM to pre-empt what was in the budget, because if he wanted that he could “read it on the front page of The Times”.

On the issue of taxes, there was a back and forth between the two; Starmer urged the PM to avoid raising taxes for families and businesses, and was told in turn that his stance on this issue was “preposterous” because he had stood on a Labour manifesto to “put up taxes by the biggest amount in the history of this country”.

After a squabble over whose councils had put up taxes the most, Starmer put forward his own pre-prepared proposals for next week’s budget, arguing that it was a “chance to choose a different path, to build a stronger future, to protect families, to give our key workers the pay rise they deserve and to back British businesses by supporting 100,000 new startups”.

Unfazed, the PM finished on a triumphant note. “If you’ll only wait till next week, I think you’ll find that we’ll do far more than that paltry agenda,” he said, before signing off with his customary criticism of Starmer’s “evanescent” support for the government: “He vacillates, Mr Speaker, we vaccinate”.